Other people's dissent

Sunday, June 3

As everybody knows by now, the Gezi Park protests have slowed down considerably over the past couple of weeks, although there is still pots-n-pans clanging of the sort that lasted for six weeks or so after Susurluk* in the late 1990s. The genie, as I observed a couple of weeks ago, has been largely stuffed back into the bottle.

Susurluk, of course, was the first major scandal that I recall prompting loads of
people in Turkey to say 'now, nothing will ever go back to the way
things were before.' The other two times in which I heard this have been
after the 1999 earthquake and after Gezi.

The shadow of Susurluk still haunts this country

Since my last post, however, I've been spending most of my time writing frantically from my undisclosed location in the Turkic-Russian borderlands, working on my book. I hope you all get a chance to read it one day.

I've been assisted in my scholarly pursuits by the generally low availability hereabouts of internet access, which has been great, a throwback to the glory days of the 1990s when I lived in Istanbul without wired and wireless encumbrances, free to embrace the simplicity of paper, pen, and word processor.

Nevertheless, I have a few minutes to spare online right now and wanted to follow up on an embryonic post that I first put up in the Borderlands Lounge last week, when I posted link to a piece that Şafak Pavey wrote for the Guardian back in the first half of this month.

Pavey writes a number of things that I wholeheartedly agree with, criticizing AKP policies regarding, among other things, education and freedom of expression. She then makes the following argument:

The same Turkey that today finds itself in this position was considered a
beacon after its establishment in 1923, an important laboratory where a
modern and secular government was reconciled with a Muslim society,
however delicate that synthesis might have been. It was widely believed
that Turkey's transformation set a model for the rest of the Islamic
world. The hope was that the reforms of the new republic would be
carried over to future generations.

I certainly do not support excluding faith from public life. But
political Islam in our country does not content itself with the role of
moral guide. Rather it aspires to mould everyone to the same imagined
pious Sunni national character by wrapping society in restrictive rules,
ostensibly for the public's own welfare, and then policing citizens and
punishing those who disagree.

What is worse is that our rising
apprehension about the direction our government is taking finds no
audience among those in the west who would never tolerate such politics
and restrictions in their own countries. The discourse of the west and
the attitudes of its leaders are important because they influence public
debate in Turkey.

However, the west, understandably obsessed by its own
security concerns and strategies, looks the other way at the Turkish
government's abuses. As a member of the opposition, what I want is not
for the west to intervene in our internal affairs, but for it to stop
shielding a government with such little regard for the values of
freedom.

Who else will be able to reconcile Islam, secularism and
democracy once Turkey fails? What are the global consequences of this
failure?

It's worth bearing in mind that Pavey describes Kemalist Turkey as 'secular,' rather than 'democratic.' Indeed, the term 'democratic' was, to a large extent, appropriated by the Refah/Fazilet/AKP movements in the 1990s and 2000s as a means for making their case, both domestically and internationally, as an alternative to the authoritarian (and secular) governments that have existed in Turkey since its founding. Reading the way that a number of folks in the US and Europe wrote about the AKP up until a couple of years ago, it seems pretty clear that this argument had a profound effect upon international views towards the AKP government.

Pavey is correct, I think, in mostly emphasizing not the approach of the AKP towards the public display of Islamic piety, but rather the intolerance of that party towards dissent. I'm not trying to run her piece down by talking about it here. Rather, I want to expand on a point she brings up, because I found her reference to 'reconciling' Islam and democracy in Turkey interesting.

The comment reminded me a lot of
conversations I've had with a number of Europeans and Americans since
the Gezi Park protests began. Particularly during my recent conference
in Copenhagen, political scientists and others that I met who are
interested in Turkey (but don't work on Turkey specifically) were quick,
like Pavey, to point out Turkey's importance in 'reconciling' Islam and
democracy.

The point I'd like to make here is this: lots of
head-cracking, gas-spraying, and much worse has gone on in Turkey for
quite some time--against leftists, against people (I'm not talking about
the PKK) who are involved in the Kurdish issue, religious types--how long did Erdoğan spend in jail again for reading that poem by Ziya Gokalp?

For the most part nobody else (including a lot of the folks who were in Gezi Park this month) cared
about this stuff because they believed the victims were
'terrorists' and 'marginal types.' Sound familiar? Well now it's the
Kemalists who are on the receiving end of the head-cracking and gassing, but this type of state
behavior in Turkey didn't begin with Erdoğan. Neither did the jailing of journalists, even if Erdoğan has taken media censorship in Turkey to levels unseen since the months and years following the 1980 coup.

Erdoğan might be considered an 'Islamist' by some, but his intolerance of political dissent is not any more 'Islamic' in nature than Mustafa Kemal's intolerance of political dissent was an inherent characteristic of secularism.

None of the above excuses in any way Erdoğan's actions, which have been
reprehensible. But what he's doing is, unfortunately, perfectly in line
with the way dissent--or at least, other people's dissent--has been received in Turkey for a very long time.

So: a lot of bad things have been happening lately (and earlier: see Ergenekon) under a government that promotes the public
display of Islamic piety, but stuff like this also took place under the watch of much more secular authorities (both in the form of elected governments and in the permanent state consisting of the military-bureaucracy-judiciary). Why then should we then see the latest
events as a special test for making sure 'Islam' and 'democracy' (a
false dichotomy in the first place) can work together?

I, for one, don't think that 'Islam,' any more than any other abstract concept, needs to be 'reconciled' with democracy. However, Turkish political leaders and the people who vote for them--just like governments and voters in every other country in the world, including my own--do need to be reconciled towards fair rules of democratic play.

Viewing 'Islam' and democracy as concepts needing to be 'reconciled' pretty much lets Erdoğan off the hook, as far as I'm concerned. After all, 'Islam' is not some explosive quantity that is prone to destroy us all if we aren't extra careful with it. If it is, then we should all excuse Erdoğan for transforming an imperfect democracy into a much more authoritarian one.

Rather, the presence or absence of democratic freedoms in Muslim-majority countries like Turkey is entirely related to specific developments taking place in those countries and the world, not the personal faith of the people who happen to live there. If Obama & crew think they're doing some kind of favor to the 'Islamic world' by keeping mum about the stuff that's taking place in Turkey right now, they're sadly mistaken.

And that's sad for everybody, frankly.

Rather
than focusing on Islam as the supposedly complicating factor here, it's
much more important, I think, to focus on the troubles relating to
democratization--whether it's Turkey or anyplace else.
***

Hey Borderheads! If you wanna feel cool, step into the Borderlands Lounge and like it on the book of face. You'll be glad you did.

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From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review